Usually in this kind of bottle handling apparatus, the discharge end of the bottle feeding conveyor is arranged parallel to the supply end of the bottle handling conveyor of say, a bottle washer, and the bottles coming along the bottle feeding conveyor are lined up in groups of a certain number and are pushed off the conveyor to one side of it by an ejection device, whereby bottles so ejected are put into the holders of the above mentioned bottle handling conveyor by a bottle insertion means such as a chute. In addition, on the delivery side of the machine the bottles are put onto the delivery conveyor by the bottle removal means.
Therefore, after the arrival of a certain number of bottles on the bottle feeding conveyor the bottle supply operation is repeated intermittently and then the handling and bottle delivery operations follow it. Because of this, there are limits to the bottle handling efficiency which can be expected. Apparatus has been proposed in which the bottles are supplied to both sides of the bottle handling conveyor. However, this increases the width of the bottle handling conveyor, which results in making the apparatus physically larger. There is a further inconvenience in case of handling profiled bottles such as oval bottles which are directional due to labelling considerations. When such bottles packed in a box in the same direction are removed and put on the bottle feeding conveyor from both sides thereof, the directions of the bottles become reversed at the receiving portion of the bottle handling conveyor. Thus, the known apparatus are disadvantageous and unsuitable for practical use.
It is an important object of the present invention to overcome the above mentioned disadvantages of the known apparatus.
An object of the present invention is to make the bottle insertion or supply means of a multistage construction to provide a bottle handling apparatus which is able to work at extremely high efficiency even when handling profiled bottles whose collecting and selecting operation is difficult.
According to the present invention there is provided bottle handling apparatus in which bottles being fed continuously to the apparatus are ejected from the feed in groups of a given size and are loaded as groups into a series of bottle holder positions on a bottle-handling conveyor of the apparatus by bottle insertion means arranged at a plurality of stages along said conveyor, a first stage of the insertion means putting bottle groups in turn into alternate or other regularly-spaced locations in the series of holder positions and holder positions left vacant by said first stage are supplied by a subsequent stage or subsequent stages similarly filling regularly-spaced locations.
Preferably, the delivery side of the bottle handling conveyor is provided with bottle removal means arranged at a plurality of stages along the feed direction, a first of said stages removing bottle groups from alternate or other regularly-spaced locations in the series of bottle holder positions of said bottle handling conveyor, and the bottle groups not removed by the first stage being similarly removed from regularly-spaced locations by a subsequent stage or subsequent stages of said removal means.
By making the bottle insertion means multistage in construction, a bottle handling apparatus can be provided which is able to work at extremely high efficiency even in handling profiled bottles the collection and selection of which is difficult. In comparison with known single-sided bottle supply mechanism, using single-stage bottle feed, the apparatus according to the invention means that adequate bottle supply efficiency can be maintained even under conditions of low speed of bottle feed and of the bottle insertion operation; thus stable continuous and trouble-free operation may be achieved. Also with the increase of bottle supply efficiency, handling efficiency of the bottle handling apparatus itself can be much more developed. For a given capacity, the bottle handling apparatus can be made smaller, and this reduces machine size and also the cost of installation expenditure. In particular, the multistage bottle supply mechanism makes possible an effective use of space without increasing the width of the apparatus, so that rational conveyor handling and compact installation can be achieved.
With the above construction, without making the apparatus larger, it is possible not only to improve bottle delivery efficiency remarkably but also to handle various types of bottles consistently at the same time, thus, the present invention facilitates the achievement of a rational lay-out of the whole bottle handling system.